Dear Brands, You Really Can’t Live Without a Marketing Stack

In today’s world of digital marketing, the presence of a unified stack for managing your marketing plan is essential. In the past, interaction with a company’s brand was experienced as a series of disparate, unrelated interactions as opposed to a single, unified experience across all channels. In this type of scenario, improvements to the overall brand experience were conducted in a one-off type of manner, where marketers focused on fixing a single transactional element of the customer’s overall experience. However, it is no longer sufficient to focus solely on individual pieces of your audience’s experience, as consumers today expect a much more personalized set of interactions.

Five Reasons Your Business Should Not Operate Without a Marketing Stack

Today, digital marketers want to move away from the transactional experience and develop more ongoing relationships with their customers. Therefore, businesses need to look beyond the standard point solution and begin creating a unified marketing stack. With the marketing stack, you can treat any individual transaction as a part of that ongoing relationship with the customer. In this type of scenario, you are measuring every part of the purchase cycle — pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase — in an effort to better understand how each contributed to the overall experience. Ultimately, the goal is to continuously refine different pieces of the purchase cycle, effectively improving the experience or relationship overall. Each block of the marketing cloud is working to make some part of that whole experience better.

Allows the Creation of Data as a Common Currency

Aside from the holistic view of developing ongoing relationships with customers and improving their overall experiences, there are five main benefits for an organization to implement a marketing stack. The first of these is to create data as a common currency among different areas of the organization. Many businesses have numerous departments that each oversees specific parts of the marketing function such as social media, online, in-store, and more. Oftentimes, these different sections of the organization are in conflict; a strategy that works for one channel does not necessarily work for another. Having a common view of the overall activity allows for a deeper understanding of the differences as well as the similarities that specific content and experiences have for the customer. In the end, data is king and provides concrete evidence of which strategies are successful in terms of conversion and building the customer relationship.

Ends Political Dissent

A second benefit of implementing the stack is the demise of political dissent within the organization. The concept of data as common currency can be used to dispel failing strategies that previously may have been sustained by success within a single silo of the organization but might conflict with the overall goal of building the customer relationship. Oftentimes, this type of siloed advertising strategy can be detrimental to the overall brand and result in the loss of audience due to non-unified brand experience across different channels. Using data as a way to provide a clear vision for how customers want to interact with your content is a key benefit of implementing the stack.

Improves Campaign Orchestration

A third benefit involves enhanced capabilities for orchestrating marketing campaigns. In the past, a business would use different products for planning marketing content and experiences for each individual channel, resulting in a non-unified experience across channels. It also required an inordinate amount of time to gather analysis from each channel and even more time to combine all of the data into a single overall view of the brand. With a unified marketing stack, you can directly coordinate an entire campaign from one platform, which simplifies the overall process and creates enormous benefits in terms of time and resources needed to organize a successful campaign.

Offers Real-Time Campaign Corrections

This leads us to our fourth benefit: the ability to make rapid changes to the campaign. The analysis afforded by a unified stack takes all of the data from across multiple channels and gives the business real-time information about how specific content is working for specific sub-segments of the audience. It also allows you to change content across all channels to ensure you are being proactive with how you are running your campaign. Without a unified stack, none of this is possible.

Enables the Successful Management of Media-Mix Modeling

The final benefit afforded by the unified stack is the ability to truly conduct media-mix modeling. This involves being able to project sales and conversions accurately based on the historical data analysis achieved from the unified platform. Each piece of the platform provides a vital piece of the puzzle to help you truly understand what content works for specific segments of your audience, and analytics built into the platform allow you to look forward and proactively provide the right content to the right customer at exactly the right time. The platform can take in unrelated information — such as local weather — and then use this abstract data to push appropriate content to users, creating a truly unified experience across the brand as well as developing the customer relationship and loyalty.

In the End, Businesses Simply Cannot Afford NOT to Have a Marketing Stack

Without a unified platform, a business is left to attempt to put all of these pieces of the puzzle together manually, and without the data as common currency, there is often political infighting that further hampers the ability to orchestrate and execute a successful marketing campaign. The introduction of the platform dispels these roadblocks and creates an environment where both the customer and the business are getting what they want out of their exchanges with each other, all while reducing the time and resources needed to develop and manage the interactions across a myriad of marketing channels.